Invasion of nerds leaves India's high-tech capital yearning for its old identity
RICHARD ORANGE IN BANGALORE his is a celebration of the nerd in each of us,' declared Partha, the pony-tailed cofounder of Mindtree, an information technology consulting firm, flashing a nervous grin at thousands of young software engineers ranged in a marquee in front of him and going on to read out a dictionary definition: 'an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person, slavishly devoted to intellectual pursuits'.
He might well have been welcoming Gordon Brown, whose recent visit to India's IT capital, Bangalore, made more headlines than it might otherwise have done because of the hullabaloo about Celebrity Big Brother. But in fact Partha was on the podium a few weeks earlier to launch Osmosis, Mindtree's annual get-together in Bangalore's Global Village business park — and his clarion call for nerdsolidarity has deep roots. Bangalore, once the leafy garrison town where the young Winston Churchill spent a charmed year playing polo and reading Gibbon, has been transformed utterly by an invasion of nerds and geeks, and tension with the locals is rising.
'I resent people who've come into Bangalore after 1993,' says Ganesh, who works for Cricinfo, a sports website. 'I hate the fact that they don't respect the cultures which already exist.' Mindtree hires a few hundred annually, but giants such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consulting bring many thousands of graduates to Bangalore from every corner of India. With them have come crazy working hours, hideous congestion, frenzied construction that has razed much of the city's colonial past, and all the spiritual and health fads that spring up in places where money is swilling around and everyone's a newcomer.
Anjana Appanna, a local radio DJ, complains: 'The city has become, at least for me, unBangalore-like. So many people have moved in that the city isn't ours anymore.' Not that nerdiness is entirely foreign to Bangalore. The Indian Institute of Science made the city a centre of technical expertise as far back as 1909. India's respected space programme was based here in 1969: that's what drew the IT industry here in the first place. But over the last decade the influx has taken on a completely different scale — as if Cambridge became the only place to work for every computer programmer in Europe, and swelled to the size of Manchester.
In December, a campaign by local poet U.R. Ananthamurthy to change the city's official name to Bengaluru — as it's known in the local Kannada language — was successful. 'When you're in a five-star hotel, you don't know where you are,' the poet explained. 'I don't want Bangalore to be a five-star hotel. I want it to be cosmopolitan, but the cosmopolitan must include the local — otherwise it's a kind of colonisation.' But the name change won't bring back old Bengaluru. If you flew in a decade ago, I am told, you could barely make out the city's houses, so shrouded were they in lush greenery; now, with the exception of the central Cubbon Park, there's very little open space left.
A conservation movement is emerging. A campaign recently rescued Premier Books, a tiny boutique whose owner is famed for an ability to locate any title somewhere in the apparent chaos. But colonial buildings are still vanishing. Ganesh says: 'One of my favourite theatres is a cinema called Plaza, built by the British. It's very crappy — roaches everywhere. But a lot of my film memories come from Plaza, and now it's being torn down.' The handsome but decaying Victoria hotel, where Churchill perused the papers, has been replaced by a monstrous shopping mall in glass and concrete where cash-rich IT types can spend $150 on a pair of Reeboks. But what angers Bangaloreans most about the IT crowd is the way they're diluting, even ridiculing, the city's distinctive, laid-back culture. Ganesh again: 'After a while it gets irritating. We're not lazy — get off my back.'
The average IT worker puts in at least a 12-hour day. With an hour-long commute through gridlocked streets, there's little time for anything else. The heavy workload and the fact that most people are far from home also means IT professionals are losing Indians' traditional rootedness in their families. 'A lot of people are staying single,' says Hari Shenoy, a software engineer at Mindtree. 'In the absence of family support structures, they tend to spend longer in the place where they're comfortable — the place of work.'
These pressures have made IT professionals prey to fads you'd associate more with Los Angeles — especially yoga tailored to the back problems that come from long hours hunched in front of a keyboard and carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive strain injury to the wrist. And the cultish Art of Living Foundation, led by guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar at his ashram outside the city, has a huge following: Hari admits that his scientific scepticism evaporated during the Sudarshan Kriya, or 'right vision' breathing exercise, halfway through a 1,000-rupee, six-day course.
All this is anathema to native Bangaloreans. 'We call them mallrats,' says Ganesh. 'If they don't find a mall, they're lost.' But as the wealthy incomers crawl through the traffic from mall to multiplex, they still pass slum-dwellers whose huts crowd every bit of unclaimed space. Last April, frustration boiled over into rioting: thousands smashed cars, burned buses and battled with police, angered by the authorities' refusal to let them pay their respects to the body of local film legend Raj Kumar. 'When there is violence in the city, then they know there is a Bengaluru,' Ananthamurthy explains.
Nevertheless, IT professionals do appear to have embraced two of Bangalore's traditional passions, books and pubs, which still form the core of the town's social life. And the 'nerd invasion' has undeniably created a thriving restaurant, music and media scene. In the last year, five new radio stations have been launched. Kingfisher, the local beer, has become a national phenomenon. All this has created an energy which locals hope can eventually take the city into another phase. 'What you're seeing now is the preliminary to the big bang,' Ganesh says. 'If you look around Bangalore, it seems like everything is being set up for something else. Something big's going to happen. Bangalore definitely needs a breath of fresh air. It can't just be IT all the time.'
Richard Orange is energy and utilities correspondent of the Business.
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